Len, The WAVE is great!
I think it is at least as useful to authors as Bobby. Bobby use to be a
good tool for administrators too (but is now much to verbose to meet that
need). I don't think the WAVE could (or should) be used in any modality
except interactively, so I don't think this is a limitation.
Two things I would like to see added:
1) Selecting links (in the result) should bring up the WAVE processed
version of the link.
2) Mark use of SCRIPT and show associated NOSCRIPT content (or highlight
missing NOSCRIPT). I think you could handle this in much the same way you
deal with ALT content. I think this would help expose when content is
hidden in JavaScript rollover .GIFs. Even better would be to have the WAVE
processed version to display all "conditional" .GIFs -- but that might be a
tougher challenge programmatically since you would have to start
interpreting JavaScript.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Leonard R. Kasday
> Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 5:14 PM
> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Cc: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
> Subject: the WAVE accessibility evaluator
>
>
> This is to announce a beta version of a new tool to help evaluate
> accessibility of Web sites. It's called the WAVE (Web
> accessibility Visual
> Evaluator) http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/ . The WAVE
> superimposes icons and labels on a web page to show what information is
> available via ALT text and applet alternatives, and show the reading
> order. This gives a person a quick way to compare the ALT text with the
> images, and the applet alternatives with the Applets. It also helps the
> user see if the reading order makes sense. In addition, missing,
> suspicious, and blank ALT text are flagged for scrutiny. In other words,
> the focus is to help a person make the basic manual checks needed to
> evaluate accessibility.
[snip]